London Is the Best City in America

It was exactly midnight when Matt dropped me at my parents’ house. There were still a few cars on the block, but the caterer seemed to be all packed up. Most of the lights inside the house were off, and both flower buggies were gone. The event, from out here at least, looked as though it had wound down.

We sat outside for a while, staring at the house, as if something were going to change—as if something were going to sneak out and surprise us, interrupt us. Or maybe that was just me. Maybe Matt was waiting for something else.

When nothing happened, we made plans to meet late tomorrow night—midnight, post-wedding—at the diner on Central Avenue we’d always gone to, to talk some more there. To keep talking about all of this.

I didn’t want to talk anymore tonight. All I wanted tonight was for Matt to kiss me again. This I wanted maybe more than anything, but I was afraid to do it myself. I was afraid of what that would open up.

So instead I kept talking, probably more than either of us wanted me to, about the only thing I couldn’t seem to stop talking about, especially when I didn’t have an answer for it yet myself.

“One last question,” I said. “You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to, but . . . what was she like?”

“Who?”

I didn’t say anything, waiting for him to figure it out himself. He looked out at the street, and I followed his eyes—followed Matt’s angle of it. The first time he’d ever driven me home, he’d sat here for a long time after I went inside. What was he thinking of then? It couldn’t have been how impossible it would all one day become for him, so impossible that he’d look to someone else to simplify it. To simplify it, and complicate it, and give him a way out.

“I’m not asking for the reason you think,” I said. “I’m not being masochistic or anything. I’m just trying to understand.”

“Understand what?”

I wasn’t ready to answer him. I wasn’t ready to tell him about what was going on with Josh. I didn’t want everything in my life to be about Josh, but it seemed like it was somehow, until I could figure out a way to untangle it again.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I guess she was a little like you, actually. She was wacky and graceful and really smart. Well, maybe the graceful part isn’t that much like you.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“No, she was just this person who made me feel good. What I remember about her most was that she had this weird obsessive-compulsive thing when she could only go to sleep if the clock was on certain numbers. I liked that for some reason. I liked waiting up with her when the time was coming out all wrong.”

“Okay, this game is over,” I said. “Not a good idea. Not a very smart game to play.”

He put his hands on the steering wheel, and turned and looked at me—really looked at me.

“The point is that it was a mistake. And I’m not saying that to be nice. I’m not saying it for anything except that I’m telling the truth. I’ve thought about it a lot since then. And I’ve always been sorry that I stepped outside of us like that. It was the only time. I guess that doesn’t matter much. But whatever questions I was hoping to answer, Em, she didn’t change the most basic part. Which was that I loved you.”

If it weren’t all so unfunny, I would have started laughing. I would have started laughing right then because this was the absolute most he’d ever said to me at one time. Why was that how it worked? Why could we say more to each other when it counted less?

I looked down at my hands. “The thing is that I think that Josh may be ruining things for himself, and I’m just not sure how to help him.”

“Things with Meryl?”

“And Elizabeth.”

“And Elizabeth.” He nodded, taking this in. “Wow. Well, I don’t know. But maybe it’s not your job to help him.”

“It feels like it is.”

“I can understand that. But if it makes you feel any better, he probably already knows what he’s going to do. I mean, in terms of the two of them, even if he hasn’t said it out loud yet. He knows which way he has to go. He is probably just figuring out how to make himself do it.”

I looked over at him. “Did you know?”

He nodded slowly. “I was going to marry you,” he said. “There was no question. That’s what I was going to do.”

I didn’t say anything, but I felt this incredible relief at hearing him say it—and then, almost simultaneously, this incredible sadness. If things were eventually going to work out, did it matter how you got there? Didn’t it ultimately just matter that you got the ending you wanted?

“You know the weirdest part? I told her right before we left for Maine that weekend. That last weekend. I told her it was over, for good.”

I tried to take this in, what I had done that weekend—that night in the hotel room—just at the moment, it seemed, before he came back to me. Was it really true that he would have, if I had let him? It didn’t seem possible—and seemed completely possible—that I had needed to wait just one night more.

“Well, that just seems like the most unfair part,” I said.